Conventional conferencing systems typically allow some form of linking. They are normally used to link geographically remote conferencing systems so as to reduce bandwidth carried over network links. Because of this, they usually require some manual intervention to set up. Identical conferences are created on each conference server and the user dials out to the remote conference system, which is joined to the conference as a normal participant. This is also referred to as conference cascading or a multi-server meeting.
A serious problem that arises when cascading the conferences is that the audio delay between the first caller in the chain and the last would be quite large contributing to audio quality degradation.
Accordingly, there is a need for techniques for expanding sizes of conferences being conducted in a conferencing system that alleviate or eliminate the media degradation problem as well as other problems.